The 30 cal 165 BT was a perfect deer bullet at 308/30-06 velocities, buy its performance on elk prompted me to pursue the Hornady 190 gr spbt for heavier game.
From the get-go Nosler explained/advertised the original Soft-Point Solid Base WAS designed specifically as a lower-cost "deer" bullet--because they already made a bullet for larger game.
When they put a plastic tip in the Solid Base, around 1985, they said the same thing, quite frequently, but that was when BALLISTIC COEFFICIENT was becoming a big factor among big game hunters. This was before laser rangefinders appeared, yet BC became a major advertising number--to the point where one of Nosler's competitors started producing a 7mm bullet they claimed had BC exactly .001 higher than the equivalent Nosler Ballistic Tip.
So a bunch of hunters used Ballistic Tips on bigger game, apparently because they shot 1-2 inches flatter at 400 yards, and often (but not always) grouped tighter than Partitions. This "accuracy advantage) didn't matter when shooting, say, elk at 500 yards, but as I have mentioned elsewhere, this was about when big game apparently shrank in size considerably, to about the size of a mature prairie dog.
As a result, elk that could have been killed quite reliably with Partitions were shot with Ballistic Tips that weren't designed for the job--and not surprisingly problems occurred. (This also happened with deer shot at "woods ranges," because apparently some hunters also believed there was some advantage in half-inch groups at 100 yards.)
Soon Nosler realized what was happening, and started toughening Ballistic Tips, both with thicker jackets and harder cores. This helped considerably, but some people still whined about everything, so Nosler introduced the AccuBond. (In this they followed the Leupold sales-model--Leupold owned Nosler back then--which was to make a scope for every tiny sub-section of the market.)
All of which is partly why some people still whine and moan when the performance of a particular bullet doesn't ALWAYS match their notion of ideal, at every range on every kind of big game....
